This competition ran in January-February 2007 and was run by Ariss. We also owe a word of thanks to Eazy-O for writing up this summary from the information posted on the forum.
I wanted a generic theme that might appeal to a wider crowd. Looking at my pile of junk, the idea came and the challenge is to make fabulous scenery out of total junk.
Some might say: "Wait, isn't that what we're doing all of the time?". Not quite. This time it's all about junk! One will need to find a pretty impressive piece of junk to start with, and then use as much of the rest (of junk) of as they can. What will matter most is the inventive use of found materials. The more creative, the better. The more people saying "I hadn't imagined you could do something like that with it", the better!
This railway station was made out of parts from old printers that I found. Most people just chuck them out. I got 3 that way. The platform and roof were old printer feed trays, and the waiting rooms were UK type electrical patress boxes. The tower was made from one end of a "Tidydry" indoor washing line with a cap from an old computer.
After some juggling around, the model virtually built itself, from the parts I had available. I work in 15mm scale which is similar to HO so I used a piece of track for that scale. I intend to make a train to go with this model.
The image to the right is a composite showing three views of the same model: one of two Warpgates that Froggy constructed for this competition. To see the other, and find out how they were made, follow this link.
After dropping out of the last competition I felt that I had to redeem myself. Suddenly it hit me like a boot to the face: I would finally make a shoehouse inspired by the nursery rhyme.
I imagined what I would do if given a huge shoe, and how I would go about creating a house from it, after a little sketching and some thinking I started building.
The main structure of the house (other than the old shoe of course), is styrofoam. It was given a timbered effect using popsicle sticks and textured with spackle. The roof tiles are cut from thing card and the chimney is made out of a drinking straw. The planked decking is more popsicle sticks and the planters are pink foam with Woodland Scenics clump foliage.
So there we have it. I really enjoyed this competition and hope the others enjoyed it as well.
We couldn't help ourselves when a friend came along with a bag full of pizza savers (the little plastic things they put on pizzas to stop them touching the lid of the box), we just had to do something crazy. We decided to make all the terrain we could, using these thingies and four days' time.
We ended up with these:
A refinery (top left). The tower is made of pizza savers and the main platform is a wheel from an old VHS tape. A plumbing rubber bolt was used on top, plus a hair roller. The steps are from a toy LuMi found in some rubbish while walking his dog.
A statue with a pedestal and a brazier on top (centre). We used two pizza savers, a Warhammer miniature, a thing that used to contain a candle for the little dome, bits of hair rollers, and a cd for the base.
An old hanging jail (top right). Two pizza savers stuck together with a miniature skeleton inside. A bit of scrap mesh on the inside, a bit of odd chain on top, sprue for hanging it up, and you've got yourself your own hanging jail.
Tank traps (bottom left). Easy one here. Just put them against rocks, paint them in steel and voila: tank traps.
A water tank (bottom right). Screws and big bolts from plumbing have been used for basing, and the main tank is a piece of an old electric fan with sprue bits for pipes and on top a plastic thing I found in the rubbish. A pizza saver holds it all up and it's based on a cd.
My entry was quite simple and easy.
To make, all I did was find a suitably sized bit of packing foam and hacked it into an unusual shape. The rocky texture was done by covering the thing in sand and priming with aerosol. The sand was applied with watered down wood glue (it works best) and poured onto the model over a plate to catch any that didn't stick (so I didn't waste any).
I could have used any big gun though I chose Lascannons from the side of a wrecked Games Workshop Predator Annihilator.
At the side is a sensor sphere (a ping pong ball) mounted on the top of an old Citadel paint pot along with a few other bits that I had lying about.
Finally the piece was painted and fished with a little flock and sponge foliage.
This was my first attempt at a competition and a great way to use up some of my junk pile.
The walls and base are foam board, the main power unit it from an old TV set, and the fan came from an old Dell computer. The various plastic pipework and stuff came from an old video machine and the rubble is a mix of cut up miniature sprues and the small electrical components found on circuit boards mixed with sand and gravel.
The right hand dynamo unit is made from a capacitor, a small speaker from a computer and a small electrical part from a TV set, all glued together.
The fan was an experiment, being black to start with. I wanted a point of focus as the rest of the model is pretty dark. I was aiming for a "well used look" rather than a clean model of a destroyed building.
The inspiration for this project was the lid to a Coffee Mate creamer bottle. This became the core of turret for a gun emplacement. In addition, an old HP printer cartridge was used as the base for a sentry tower.
For the turret, the materials consisted of the top to the creamer bottle, a tooth paste tube lid, a cap for a syringe, three bits of plastic tube, and a plastic cap from a paper roll dispenser.
The tower is a printer cartridge. Both pieces were detailed with card panels and the tower was based on an 8 x 8 inch piece of Masonite. This was textured with spackle, PVA and old coffee grounds. The turret was not attached to the base so it can be move, removed, rotated, etc.
This project started with two cookie trays which make nice warehouses (in the foreground). These were attached to a base so they won't scoot around the table as easily and have blocks of cheap white packing foam inside to give them a little support in case something is dropped on them.
The wrecked building (back right) was another kind of cookie container that I'd started work on years ago and forgotten about. It was even more fragile and I was thinking of how to make this entry different from my other warehouses and on a whim I pounded one end of the building with my fist until it crumpled and split open. It still needed some kind of support, though, so I made a frame from model sprue. A broken mechanical pencil was sawed up to make barrels. Those along with some heavy staples were painted and glued inside the burst warehouse to resemble some kind of debris still inside.
The smokestacks are plastic cogs from paper towel rolls and the grill is granny grating. The roads were painted with a base coat of black followed by successive washes of tan, brown, and black. The white lines were drawn with a china marker.
After working a lot of hours and watching some dodgy movies, I was inspired to build the top of an underground missile silo and some surrounding countryside.
I grabed a cable reel and some old wires along with a piece of found MDF and some foam. Cutting the reel in half I embedded it into the stryofoam and glued it to the MDF.
I discovered some other bits of an old toy and a GW paintpot lid and added them, as well as cutting a piece of foamcore for the silo doors.
Not happy with not using the wire, I began to wonder if a fence or some razorwire or similar would enhance the piece? In the end I decided to build a tree from the wire.
This piece was designed to be a number of things gamewise. Either to be an objective marker for smaller missions - like you have to disable it before being able to land further troops - or be able to shelter a squad and provide cover. It could also just block lines of sight or become difficult ground to impede vehicles.
Shortly before the competition was announced, I was working to cut some 1/4 inch plexiglass with my Dremel and burned the motor out. I knew I'd be able to use it for something, so I kept it until the announcement.
My first thoughts were to use it as a rail-towed gun, though digging through my bits boxes, I was never able to find a set of wheels that I liked, nor did I have any decent looking tracks for them to ride on.
In the end, I wound up with a turret mounted gun. Once I decided on the core pieces, the project went pretty quickly, only really being held up so I could take WIPS as I went. All I did was take interesting looking bits from my bits box(es) and assembled them.
Here in the States, I can buy a cheap epoxy called 'Stix On Contact', and that is the primary agent that holds all of this together, even attaching everything to the pink insulating foam I used for the base. I have since found that it does in fact eat the foam away. It's good for the bulk of the assembly, but I'll eventually need to reattach the base.
The paint job was just basic. The whole thing was sprayed with cheap equipment grey primer, then a coat of flat black. From there I started adding colors, and drybrushing the details in.